April 1915-March 1916
The Serbs sent the Berry unit to Vrnjača Banja, a spa town in the highlands 80 miles south of Belgrade. For their HQ and hospital, the Berry’s had chosen the Terapia, a grand sanatorium gone somewhat to seed but where water and a generator could be made to run with the aid of Austrian POW’s. Of these there was an ample supply, Serbia having routed the initial Hapsburg invasion. Conscripted from all walks of life, the prisoners came with a wide array of skills; deloused, they made excellent helpers, only too happy to be out of a war whose point few could fathom. Margery’s German came in handy.
On arrival she sent her mother a postcard. “The country is like Switzerland…all the people in fancy dress and so nice to talk to. Lovely, but” — a “but” tinged with disappointment — “I have struck a most luxurious spot, just like a hotel, with not enough work to go round. The awful time is apparently all over and we have got here too late.” She had not given up hope. “Perhaps a hard time may come.”
It came quickly for Mabel Dearmer, another VAD who had just arrived in Serbia that month, but on a different ship. She was wife of Rev. Percy Dearmer whose name will be familiar to any who read the credits below the hymns in an Anglican hymnal. The socialist vicar of St Mary-the-Virgin, Primrose Hill, London, he would certainly have been known to Margery’s father. She was a playwright, novelist, illustrator and gardener. Her chief concern when war came was finding takers for the plums in the garden of her Cotswold cottage. “The murder of an Archduke meant no more to me that some tale of an imaginary kingdom in Zenda.”
When Rev. Dearmer officiated at a send-off for Mrs. Stobart’s unit organized by the Church League for Women’s Suffrage at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, his wife was in the pews to say goodbye to Lady Paget, a friend. “This is only an au revoir,” she heard her husband tell the volunteers, “for I myself am to accompany you to Serbia.”
Rev. Dearmer had neglected to inform his wife. In her memoir. The Flaming Sword, Mrs. Stobart recalled:
As I walked down the down the aisle at the conclusion of the service, Mrs. Dearmer, with tears in her eyes, came up to me. “This is the first I have heard of my husband going to Serbia. Mrs. Stobart, you must take me with you — as an orderly. My sons are at the front and now my husband is going. I must go too.”
I’m afraid I was brutal. I pointed at her earrings and pretty chiffons.
“This kind of thing isn’t suitable,” I said.
“I will leave them all behind, and wear — well, your uniform!” as she looked bravely at my dull grey clothes.
“But you would have to obey discipline and as an orderly do all sorts of things disagreeable to you.”
“Oh, I should love discipline and I wouldn’t care what I did; anything would better than” — and tears would not be restrained — “being in that house alone.”
Soon after arriving at the Stobart camp in Kragujevač, at that point the plague-ridden Serbian capital, Mrs. Dearmer was told by a fellow volunteer of similar background: “You know, there is never a tea-party in Serbia that doesn’t begin with lice and end with latrines.” From the lice, you caught typhus; from bad or non-existent latrines, typhoid. It was the latter that did for her. Mrs. Stobart caught it too but fought it off. Margery was in Kragujevač at the time and attended the funeral at the Orthodox cathedral. In a card to Mith, she wasted no space on the obsequies . “It was grand,” was all she had to say, before adding, “I am very well indeed, but cut my finger with a scythe mowing before breakfast.”
William Coulson, the Stobart unit driver Margery had dazzled on the voyage to Salonika, gave her father a few extra details. “The Orthodox priest held forth for an hour or so and then others took it up. They tied her feet together at the great toes — but the Serbs wanted to untie [them] so as to put on her shoes. I would not let them.”
Back at Vrnjača Banja, the “hard time” Margery yearned for had still not arrived, She was enjoying herself nonetheless.
I have been ‘special nurse’ to two patients, one a little girl with diphtheria and malaria, and an old man with erysipelas. Both legs have got it all the way up, and he has lead lotion lint bound round them 3 times a day. My work is: first wash and fix up the little girl, then have breakfast at 6.30 and go down to another hospital and get the table for dressing ready, sterilize all the instruments, undo the bandages and prepare for the doctor or sister who does the dressings; stand and hand them lint gauzes, forceps etc. … and interpret orders to the Austrian prisoner orderlies. Then sterilize and clear up again and get tea for doctors or nurses. Take temperatures, wash up tea things, feed patients, and have dinner. After dinner look for lice, wash feet and do heads with paraffin, give feeds, take temperatures, do especially bad cases again. Come back and fix up kid for the night; and, after supper (a secret) help Austrian prisoners clean and wash up.
Margery’s solicitude for the Austrians caught the Berry’s amused attention. From their memoir, A Red Cross Unit in Serbia:
Some of the prisoners were possibly…a little spoiled by sympathetic members of the Unit, but probably this did little harm either to the spoiled or the spoilers. Perhaps one of the worst offenders in this respect was one of our V.A.D.’s, whom we will call Doña Quixota, because that is a name which certainly fits her well. She was tall and comely, indeed beautiful, though not exactly of the buxom type which fulfils the Serbian ideal…On the voyage out she had passed her time feeding miserable animals and attending to the seasick and infirm. She was always looking for and helping the sick and suffering, always standing up for the oppressed. If she sometimes imagined the suffering or mistook the oppressor for the oppressed, “Que voulez-vous?” she was a feminine Don Quixote! She was splendidly genuine, and before the final release of the Unit she was reduced to the depths of destitution in regard to shoes and clothes, as she had given away most of her belongings. She would have driven a charity organisation committee to distraction, and she made heads of units and keepers of stores feel stony-hearted misers when they withstood the white heat of her generosity. Doña Quixota pitied the poor prisoners and tried to alleviate their sad lot by doing part of their work herself ! She thought Julius overworked — Julius, the ever-growing rotundity of whose form made him resemble an incipient alderman — and she would squeeze time from her multitudinous duties to wash dishes or peel potatoes for him. One day she was seen vigorously sweeping a garden path while Johann of the auburn hair reclined at ease on the grass by the side, enjoying his off-duty hour. I thought of Gilbert and Sullivan’s line “the prisoner’s lot is not a happy one” and wished for a camera! But the proceeding was too much even for the easy-going Johann, and he spoilt the picture by springing up and taking the broom out of the hands of Doña Quixota.
Industrial scale slaughter was under way in France and the bloodlands between Russia and Prussia. The Turks were dashing Winston Churchill’s dream of thrusting into the soft underbelly of the Central Powers — Germany and Austria-Hungary — via the Dardanelles. For the time being, Serbia was relatively tranquil. The Berry’s shifted their focus to the health of the local population and began to wonder whether they might not be more useful elsewhere. Margery wrote home in August:
Now my work is housework, my old trade…I make night nurses’ beds, then feed the chickens, then have breakfast, then interpret for the English cook and the Hungarian boy who helps in the kitchen, then see to the rooms. An old man is supposed to do this. We are taking civilian patients now, many of them children. One has been partly eaten by a pig. A doctor told me he saw a case of two children entirely eaten, all but their heads and hands and feet.
The Berry’s put their POWs to work improving the town’s dire sanitation. Their showcase project was a new slaughterhouse. Margery described the laying of the foundation stone:
There was a service with priests and singing…The priests sprinkle the people with bunches of herbs dipped in holy water and the chief people are offered the cross to kiss while the priest dabs them on the head with the wet herbs. It was funny seeing the Princess’s1 little hat getting its dab. Did I tell you about the grand concerts we had for three days? Austrian prisoners — three bands were taken prisoner — go round playing to get money for Serb officers’ widows. It was such a treat, except that they missed out German music. Still, we had Dvorak and the 1812 of Tchaikovsky. San Saëns’ Skeleton Dance was horrible in its new light; it made you think it was the poor fellows’ comrades dancing before them.
Not long after this letter landed, her father wrote in the Margery Book,
Serbia was invaded by the Austro-Germans from the North and the Bulgarians in the East and South. The Serbs confidently hoped for help from the Allies, indeed Niš was beflagged (with Union Jacks and French tricolores) under the impression that they were coming. Orders had gone forth to the Serbs not to engage in pitched battle, but to adopt rearguard actions and fall back — this in expectation of British help. It was very hard for the doctors and nurses to be reproached by the Serbs when help never came. They felt they had been betrayed.
Non-medical staff had the option of joining the Serbian retreat west toward Montenegro, Albania and the Adriatic. The stories of those who survived the trek over snowbound mountain passes clogged with starving refugees in the dead of winter would be the stuff of legend. Margery chose capture. A colleague who made it out tried to reassure her parents: “Your daughter was divided between the joy of tramping it out through Montenegro and the excitement of being taken prisoner, and finally decided the latter would be the greatest experience. We left her in the best of health and excellent spirits.”
Not everyone’s spirits were excellent. “We are all very depressed,” wrote Frances Berry, “and I really think our prisoners are about as depressed as we are. The POWs, with few exceptions, have no interest in being freed and sent back to the front. Some who surrendered unwounded are afraid they will be shot as deserters.”
The invaders who duly arrived on November 9, “without éclat or disturbance of any kind”, in Frances Berry’s words. That they were Austrian rather than German was a relief, the latter having an altogether more fearsome reputation.
Among the soldiers we came across, we found no shade of animosity towards ourselves as representatives of an enemy country…With regard to the behavior of the Austrian soldiers to the Serbian population, that was undoubtedly good…There were practically no stories of atrocities or deeds of violence, and little serious pillaging in spite of the fact that half starved soldiers were for many weeks wandering about the neighborhood and constantly begging for food…In our hospital Serbian and Austrian patients were on perfectly friendly terms…all the more surprising as the (Austrian) soldiers were largely Magyars and between Magyars and Serbs is longstanding animosity…It decidedly tends to show that the responsibility for atrocities is to be laid at the doors of those in authority more than the perpetrators, and that if the “bête humaine” is present in most most natures it requires not merely letting loose, but considerable prodding before it comes out of its hidden dwelling place and displays its horrors.
She might be a prisoner, but Margery was not to be denied Christmas. She was determined to have a tree, her father would write.
She and a Serbian orderly went round the cottages and homesteads and managed to purchase small quantities of meal collected in a pillowcase. An Austrian canteen obliged them with 2 lbs. of sugar which cost 16 shillings (an astronomical sum), walnuts, leaves of tobacco in bunches, boxes of matches, a little tinned milk, and rice. These were made up into sweets of sorts. This supplied their Christmas dinner and Christmas tree. Margery cut up the top of a biscuit tin…into sconces to hold candle ends fixed on the tree.
The festivities included fancy dress — Margery improvised an impressive cowboy outfit — and amateur theatricals in which she was assigned the lead. Frances Berry again:
We dramatised the story of Pepelyouga, the Serbian Cinderella, culled from Petrovitch’s “Hero Tales and Legends of the Serbians,” and wove into the drama allusions to other Serbian myths and national heroes. With the help of costumes and spindles borrowed or bought from peasants, and with Pirot carpets on the walls, the setting was made as typically Serbian as possible. Doña Quixota made her debut as an actress in the role of the heroine. She threw herself into the part and quite scored a triumph, but it took some coaching and persuasion to induce her to condescend to accept in a proper spirit any lovemaking from the Prince, or to sacrifice her democratic prejudices so as to appear in jewelry and silk attire. However, the fact that these were Serbian and not British mitigated the humiliation.
On January 3, 2016, a postcard reached the Barbers, now living in Ely, the cathedral town north of Cambridge. “Dearest Mith. Having a lovely time. Would not have missed it for anything. May be sent home soon.” A letter followed. “I do not want to come home yet so if I get a chance, I shall join another Hospital and nurse Serbian prisoners or Austrian soldiers. I and three sisters want to stay on and do a little more now we are here. But if I have to come home with the rest please be on the lookout for another job for me.”
The Berry party, now 25 strong, set out by train on February 21. Grateful Serbs gave them a roast pig for the journey. Accompanying them as far as Vienna were two guards, “very pleasant fellows”, the Berry’s thought, Hungarian, in civilian life one a prosperous farmer, the other a traveling salesman. The salesman owed his cushy billet to heroics. When the Austrians were thrown back across the Save river the year before, he swam his general to safety though himself wounded.
Rev. Barber added a detail: “During the railway journey, Margery disarmed one of the guards in charge of the party by seizing his bayonet and with it cutting up some chocolate which she gave him.” At some point before the party reached Budapest, Margery, in her father’s telling, made friends with a German officer carrying dispatches from Constantinople: “She asked him, as he graciously claimed ancient Teutonic relationship, whether he could arrange for them to see round the town. This he seemed most proud to do.”
The Berry’s account is fuller but does not mention Doña Quixota’s role in chatting up the officer.
We were agreeably surprised by the entry of a pleasant young man in the uniform of the German Imperial Guard and wearing the Iron Cross. He sat down among us and stayed a long time, telling us he came from Hamburg, which was “half English”, that he has visited England many times in his yacht, and had played in a championship tennis tournament at Wimbledon. “The English and Hamburgers are cousins,” he said, “for the English came from our neighborhood,” which was true enough as the original Engel-land was close to the mouth of the Elbe. He spoke almost perfect English and took such a fancy to our party that upon arrival at Budapest he insisted on taking nearly the whole Mission to see the sights of the town while our luggage was being transported to another railway station.
Also on his way home from Serbia was Dr Graham Aspland, a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps we will meet again shortly. He had been captured while serving as surgeon-in-chief at the Anglo-Serbian hospital in Kragujevač. He and his fellow prisoners (they included his wife) had been treated respectfully by the Austrians, good fellows who clearly wanted out of the war, he told Reuters, the news agency. The Germans, on the other hand, lived down to stereotype. Having interned all Serb men aged between 17 and 50, they had “cleared the country of everything they wanted, including 60 000 pigs and cattle”. To cap it all, they had no manners.
Every Austrian soldier, and even Austrian officers of higher rank than myself, always saluted me in the streets. The Germans never did so, but were always insulting. On the German-controlled railway, we had to travel in horse boxes, but as soon as we came under Austrian administration we were transferred to first and second class carriages…German officers jeered at their Austrian comrades and asked, “Why do you help the English swine.”
“Margery arrived home, at Ely, March 7, 1916, little the worse for her experiences,” her father logged in the Margery Book.
She had contracted a chill on the very cold journey through Europe — snow all the way. And no wonder, for we found out afterwards that she had parted with most of her underclothing to give to another nurse. We learnt of this through her uncle Fred W. Barber, who at Fulham Military Hospital, on May 25, 1916, met Nurse Murfy, late member of the 2nd British Farmers’ Unit which had been working in Serbia. She was tremendously enthusiastic about Margery and said she and others could never forget her kindness. M. did no end for them, and must have denied herself in order to supply underclothing and other necessaries.
- The Princess was the consort of Prince Alexis Karageorgevich who had a decent claim to be king of Serbia after the previous one was gaudily assassinated in 1903 but yielded to a more determined cousin. Now, instead, he was President of the Serbian Red Cross. His wife was the former Myra Abigail Pratt. She came from Cleveland money. A golfer of some repute she took bronze in the 1900 Olympics. He was her third husband. She was his second shot at marrying an American. The parents of the first, Mabel Swift of Chicago, refused their consent, apparently because the marriage would have been Morganatic and she would not have become queen had he become king.
